All of us who use the Internet to any extent have searched for something at some point on the web. Never before in history has so much, mainly free, information been so easy to access. But, because all this information is out there, finding what you're looking for often requires more than luck (although luck helps, too). The goal of a good search is to cut down the amount of time you spend sifting through all those search results for that proverbial needle in the haystack. The key is to create more accurate search queries using advanced syntax and Boolean logic operators that are available through most commercial search engines. But don’t let the term Boolean logic throw you. You actually use it every day in conversation.

Boolean logic lets you set up relationships between concepts based on operators such as AND, NOT, and OR. For example, if you were looking for information on (football) stadiums but not (baseball) stadiums you might think of the logical relationship as being expressed by: find me stadiums with baseball and without football. Boolean logic just takes a simple statement like that and formalizes it a little, so it looks like this: "stadiums AND football AND NOT baseball." This query will find documents on the Net which contain the keywords "stadiums" and "football" but which don't contain the word "baseball." Most all of the Boolean operators also have symbolic equivalents. So the same query above can also be written as: "stadiums +football –baseball."

Some other Boolean operators are:

• "" (quotes) - Specifies that documents must contain the phrase within the quote marks. For example, "Tampa, Florida" will find documents with this exact phrase.
• OR (|) - This operator indicates a search for documents containing any of the terms joined by the operator.
• NOT (!) - This operator excludes documents containing the term that follows the operator. So, "salt AND NOT pepper" or "salt !pepper" will find documents about salt that don't mention pepper.
• NEAR (N) - This operator finds documents in which two words appear within 25 words of each other.
• (), {}, [], <> (parentheses) - This nesting operator can be used to group expressions when building more sophisticated queries. For example, (Marshall +Stephens) AND (appraisals |valuations) is a sample of a nested query.
• + (plus sign) - Placed at the beginning of a word, this operator indicates that the word is required. For example, Florida +beaches will return docs that mention both Florida and beaches.
• - (minus sign) - Placed at the beginning of a word, this operator indicates that the word must be excluded. For example, Florida -beaches will return docs only with Florida.
• *, ? (wildcard) - Wildcards can be used to truncate words so that results contain variations of a word. So, apprais* or apprais? will return results containing such variations as appraiser, appraisers, appraising and so on. These should be used more often.